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"Corner in Wheat" is a short social drama, featuring Arthur
Johnson and cinematographer Billy Bitzer, stars of Silent Hall of Fame.
A greedy speculator decides to "corner" the wheat market,
artificially raise the price on the market and profit from this. He is
successful and makes a huge amount of money, but his action has disastrous
consequences in real life, where the price of bread doubles, many people cannot
afford it any more, wheat growers are ruined and the supply of charity bread is
drastically reduced.
"Corner in Wheat" was added to the National Film Registry in 1994
as being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically
significant".
Directed by
D.W. Griffith
Scenario
D.W. Griffith, Frank E. Woods
Based on
the novel The Pit (1903) by Frank Norris
Cinematography
G.W. Bitzer
Starring
Frank Powell, Henry Walthall, Arthur Johnson
Distributed by
Biograph Company
Release date
December 13, 1909
Country
United States
Running time
14 m.
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Reviewer:
gallowglass
-
favoritefavoritefavoritefavorite -
January 31, 2021
Subject:
Grinding the Poor
Why the poster for this film should show a young couple enjoying a romantic tryst in a wheatfield is hard to fathom. There are no young couples in the story, and there is no romantic sub-plot to this solemn screenplay about the evils of capitalism.
Rather improbably, a granary owner has managed to corner the entire world market for wheat, so he is able to screw-down the earnings of cereal farmers, while doubling the price of bread, reducing the poor to desperate straits. Griffith uses cross-cutting techniques to dramatise the contrast between the hardscrabble life of the poor and the lavish indulgences of the rich. At the bakery, humble families find they can’t afford a loaf, and a riot is brewing. At the granary, the wheat-king is proudly showing his friends around his office in the hour of triumph… until karma strikes.
Many have noted a biblical dimension to the story, with themes of sin and retribution, possibly with symbolic reaping and sowing referenced in the scenes at the wheatfield.
A one-reeler (15 minutes) was about all that cinema audiences could take in 1909, yet this short silent is enshrined as culturally significant by the Library of Congress, as it represented the peak of film art for its time. It was also one of the last films Griffith made in New York, before he and Mack Sennett discovered Hollywood, and Linda Arvidson, to whom Griffith was secretly married, plays the farmer’s wife. Finally, the wheat-pit at the Chicago trading floor is curiously recognisable today for its ‘gracelessness under pressure’ as the late Studs Terkel put it.
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